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by causi 1308 days ago
Two points: Firstly, the article has zero example of the "native knowledge" in question. Secondly, the Maori are not indigenous to New Zealand, arriving a scant couple centuries before Europeans, and had done tremendous damage to the native environment by the time Europeans got there.
1 comments
cgrealy 1308 days ago
> Firstly, the article has zero example of the "native knowledge" in question.

You mean apart from this link that specifically talks about use tradition harvesting practices and local knowledge to find the kōura to study?

https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/freshwater/research-projects/...

> Maori are not indigenous to New Zealand

Completely untrue. They are absolutely indigenous to NZ.

I'm so tired of this stupid myth being brought up again and again. Yes, Maori arrived in NZ. They were the first people to do so. They are the indigenous people of NZ.

Unless you want to argue that to be "indigenous", you literally need to have evolved in that place, which is a nonsense argument as far as humans are concerned.

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causi 1308 days ago
Yes, Maori arrived in NZ. They were the first people to do so.

So you don't count as indigenous if you weren't the first? That's bad news for all the Clovis-descended peoples we now call Native Americans, since they were the second major wave of human migration. That is of course ridiculous, because time of inhabitation is a significant part of being indigenous. If it were discovered another group had beaten the Maori to New Zealand, would that suddenly make them not indigenous in your eyes?

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cgrealy 1307 days ago
Merriam Webster - Indigenous: of or relating to the earliest known inhabitants of a place and especially of a place that was colonized by a now-dominant group

Wikipedia - Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original peoples

By what measure are Maori not indigenous to NZ? If another group arrived first, they certainly didn't stay, and even by your own measure of "time of inhabitation", Maori have been here the longest (at least 350 years before Europeans).

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Mandatum 1308 days ago
It grinds my gears that people still believe that shit, even here..
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